the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect. Cavour
sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues on
the same benches by the enunciation of views which to them were rank
heresies. They existed in a state of perpetual uneasiness as to what
he might say or do next.

Cavour was not re-elected when Parliament was dissolved in January
1849; he was therefore not in the Chamber during the debates which
preceded and followed the last desperate throw of Novara. A letter
written by him six days after the battle shows what he thought of
those events. The Conservative party, he says, which represented the
great majority in the country, had been badly supported by it (an
assertion as true now as then). The king threw himself into the arms
of demagogues who thought that freedom and independence were to be won
by phrases and proclamations. The army had been disheartened, the best
officers kept inactive; twelve months' sacrifices of men and money
placed them in a worse condition than before the Milan revolution.
Self-love might, he concluded, warp his judgment, but he had the
intimate conviction that, if he had held the reins of power, he could
have saved the country without any effort of genius, and planted the
Italian flag on the Styrian Alps. But his friends joined with his foes
to keep him out of power, and he had passed his time in deploring
faults which it would have been very easy to avoid.

Remembering what Cavour afterwards accomplished, these are words which
should not be set lightly aside. Yet it is possible that the complete
disaster into which Charles Albert rushed at Novara was the only thing
to save the country and to lay the foundations of Italian unity. The
king was more eager for war than the most unthinking democrat. Reviled
by all parties, he sought the great conciliator, death. "The Italians